Missions and mission-oriented innovation policy for sustainability: A review and critical reflection

The concept of ‘sustainability missions’ has recently received increasing attention in the academic literature. Broadly defined as a collective ambition to strengthen systemic preparedness and adaptive capacity for various policy challenges, the concept of sustainability missions invites critical reflection due to its rise in usage and...

Innovatieprestatie in Nederlandse Topsectoren = Innovation performance in Dutch top sectors

The goal of the European Committee is to achieve 3% of the GDP by 2020, which could create 3.7 million jobs within the European Union. For achieving this target, the European Commission continued the track of the Lisbon Strategy into the 2020 Strategy enacting amongst other the initiative “Innovation Union”. Given the importance of innovation,...

European innovation policy: New rationales and challenges

Can European eco-innovation policies accelerate the uptake of product-service systems?

Despite the apparent potential of product-service systems (PSS) as a more profitable, resource efficient and socially responsible form of eco-innovation, there has seemingly been limited uptake of this type of business model. A current gap in the literature is that most of the available academic work on PSS has focussed on design strategies,...

The backlog issue in patents: A look at the European case

Backlogs can be caused by an increase in the number of patent applications and patent size. A large number of patents granted could be explained by patent examiners' bonuses, legal and cultural contexts, claim forms, the geographical origin of patents, a firm's experience in patenting, the number of inventors involved in the patent application,...

Patent pools: Intellectual property rights and competition

Patent pools do not correct all problems associated with patent thickets. In this respect, patent pools might not stop the outsider problem from striking pools. Moreover, patent pools can be expensive to negotiate, can exclude patent holders with smaller numbers of patents or enable a group of major players to form a cartel that excludes new...

Rehabilitation robotics in robotics for healthcare ; a roadmap study for the European Commission

To gain understanding in the current status of Robotics in healthcare the European Commission issued a roadmap study into this domain. This paper reports on the main characteristics and results of this study. The study covered the wide domain of Healthcare and in this paper the domains relevant for Rehabilitation Robotics are highlighted. The...

Purification and immunoglobulin E-binding properties of peanut allergen Ara h 6: Evidence for cross-reactivity with Ara h 2

Background: IgE-binding peanut proteins smaller than 15 kDa were previously identified as potential allergens in the majority of our peanut allergic population. Objective: To characterize the novel allergen in order to determine whether it was similar to one of the thus far identified recombinant peanut allergens (Ara h 1-7). Methods: An IgE...